Pondering this very question myself, is 2gb really that much slower even with the SSD harddisc? I thought that once you had good speed on the harddrive then running out of memory would not be that big of a deal?
Anyone had any tests done on MBA when memory full vs MBP (with HDD) when memory full and seeing how it affects performance and how much quicker a machine with SSD is vs HDD when memory is full?
If you're planning on keeping your MBA for some time, heavy paging (running out of memory) is really hard on a SSD with FINITE write cycles, especially the Toshiba controller type used in the MBA's SSD which ends up using more write cycles than other SSD types. (this is due to the agressive garbage collection as OSX does not support TRIM) Of course, it isn't bad if your SSD is not filled up (as the controller has much more room to "wear-level", but since many of us are going to have 80-90% full SSD's, the wear rate is going to be higher. I've used SSD's since the craptastic indilinx powered ones and I've actually worn a few out lol.
Excerpts taken from Anandtech's review of Kingston's latest SSD which shares the same configuration as our MBA's SSD's:
"This drive uses the T6UG1XBG controller but with updated firmware. The new firmware enables two things: very aggressive OS-independent garbage collection and higher overall performance. The former is very important as this is the same controller used in Apple's new MacBook Air"
"The V+100 aggressively tries to reorganize writes and recycle bad blocks, more aggressively than we've seen from any other SSD.
The benefit of this is you get peak performance out of the drive regardless of how much you use it, which is perfect for an OS without TRIM support - ahem, OS X. Now you can see why Apple chose this controller.
There is a downside however: write amplification. For every 4KB we randomly write to a location on the drive, the actual amount of data written is much, much greater. It's the cost of constantly cleaning/reorganizing the drive for performance. While I haven't had any 50nm, 4xnm or 3xnm NAND physically wear out on me, the V+100 is the most likely to blow through those program/erase cycles. Keep in mind that at the 3xnm node you no longer have 10,000 cycles, but closer to 5,000 before your NAND dies. On nearly all drives we've tested this isn't an issue, but I would be concerned about the V+100. Concerned enough to recommend running it with 20% free space at all times (at least). The more free space you have, the better job the controller can do wear leveling."
